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United forces against Covid-19

Young Academy of Belgium (Flanders) Joined Forces Against Covid-19

In March and April 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic and drastic measures struck, the Young Academy took various initiatives to tackle the societal impact of the virus.

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#Covid Campus

Crowdsourcing methods for a rapid transition to distance teaching and telework with help from many academics on social media, resulting in an online overview document #CovidCampus.

Gathering volunteers from the Belgian scientific community into a Slack environment “Mitigate Corona”. Monitoring and connecting bottom-up initiatives in Belgium to design and build emergency ventilators and supplies (which fortunately were not needed in Belgium).

Translating into Dutch a Medium article by Tomas Pueyo on the need for rapid action.

VLAANDEREN

HELEMAAL

DIGITAAL

Co-founding the taskforce “Vlaanderen Helemaal Digitaal” of the Flemish Government, which connected providers of digital solutions with companies, organizations, and governments that were facing new challenges. On Thursday 19 November 2020, the Young Academy organized an online inspiration event on the involvement of stakeholders in research. This is the theme of an internal working group, of which the members are organizing focus groups and preparing a report with guidelines. Involving patients in medical research has become relatively well established, but we wanted to explore the advantages and risks of extending this practice to other fields of study. In the context of the current pandemic, for instance, it seems that every citizen is a stakeholder. For the event, we invited our own stakeholders to participate in various ways: by entering the competition on life after the pandemic, by participating in the panel, and - more tradionally - by attending the event and asking questions.

If you missed it, you can see an overview in the sketchnotes or check out relevant sections of the recording on https:// jongeacademie.be/iedereenbetrokken